RFK Jr. and the Credentialed Charlatans Who Broke American Public Life

How grifters used real credentials to sell fear, flatter ignorance, and hollow out public trust.

Illustration by Riley Levine

I woke up this morning not feeling great. That is pretty much par for the course when you have multiple sclerosis and are also a brain surgery survivor. Half the time when I feel like this, I am not even sure whether it is the MS messing with me or the aftereffects of the surgery I had in 2022. It is not exactly a fun guessing game — more like a deeply unfunny version of Let’s Make a Deal where every curtain reveals a different kind of bad morning. Most days I have gotten pretty good at not letting it slow me down, but some mornings you just drag yourself through the first hour and hope the caffeine kicks in before your patience runs out.

So the last thing I wanted to see was a news story about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But because God either has a strange sense of humor or just genuinely does not like me, the first thing on my timeline was exactly that: RFK Jr., again, holding forth about vaccines and public health and whatever other ambulance he had decided to chase that morning. And as I sat there in my sick bed shaking my head at a man whose qualifications to run the Department of Health and Human Services amount to “rich, loud, and related to someone famous,” it got me thinking — not just about Kennedy, but about the entire ecosystem of credentialed charlatans that has taken root in American public life. We are living through a specific and recurring grift, and it is time to name it clearly.

The credentialed charlatan follows a recognizable pattern. First, you acquire a legitimate degree or platform — law school, medical school, a doctorate, a television show built on someone else’s credibility. You use that credential to open the door. You get the audience, the book deals, the speaking fees, the cultural authority that comes with being the person who did the work. And then, once you are comfortably inside, you spend the rest of your career telling everyone else the door should not exist. The credential becomes purely decorative. It is the key you used to get in, not something you actually believe in. That is the grift. And it runs on any ideology you hand it.

Kennedy is the obvious place to start because he was literally in my newsfeed before I finished my first Red Bull. A lot of people only really learned who RFK Jr. was in 2024, when he grifted his way through a presidential campaign before ultimately crash-landing into Trump’s orbit like a confused bird flying into a window. But his anti-vaccine activism goes back decades, long before MAGA gave it a bigger platform and a Cabinet salary. Let me be fair: Kennedy is not a stupid man. He knows how to talk. He knows how to posture as a brave truth-teller pushing back against institutions. But knowing how to sound confident is not the same thing as knowing medicine, and that distinction matters a hell of a lot when you are the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has a legal and advocacy background. That does not make him a public health expert, no matter how many podcasts he goes on or how dramatically he stares into the camera.

He was also hardly inventing the wheel. The modern anti-vaccine movement figured out a long time ago that it needed more than bad science — bad science alone does not sell. It needed storytellers. Andrew Wakefield supplied fraudulent research dressed up as medicine. Jenny McCarthy supplied a marketable face and an emotional hook — a mother with an autistic son, which is a real and valid personal experience, but a personal experience is not clinical expertise, and confusing the two is exactly how these grifts get traction. Having a son who is autistic makes you a parent with a perspective. It does not make you an immunologist. I have MS. That does not make me a neurologist. It makes me a guy who has learned a lot of things he never wanted to know about lesions.

If you want to see just how far that narrative’s legs can carry it, look at what happened in Samoa in 2019. Vaccination rates had already fallen in the aftermath of a tragic medical error when anti-vaccine fear spread through the population like a brush fire. Kennedy’s organization and its allies helped fuel the kind of institutional distrust that public health officials said made the crisis dramatically worse. Eighty-three people died, most of them children under five. Kennedy denies responsibility, naturally. He always does. The man has never met a consequence he was willing to own. But the fact that reasonable people can debate whether the worst thing he has done medically was Samoa or what he is doing right now as HHS Secretary tells you everything you need to know about the trail this man has left behind.

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Because what he is doing as HHS Secretary is a disaster by any honest accounting. Under Kennedy’s watch, a measles outbreak — measles, a disease we had essentially eliminated — has spread without meaningful federal containment. His department canceled grants for mental health and substance abuse programs, the kinds of programs that exist because real people are in real crisis, not because bureaucrats needed something to do on a Tuesday.

The drama at the FDA has been so constant that the White House has been quietly replacing Kennedy’s top officials with people of their own choosing. According to The Daily Beast, his standing among White House staff is at a new low, and Trump aides are actively trying to shield the president from his own Cabinet secretary because Kennedy’s vaccine conspiracies are polling so badly ahead of the midterms that they have become an electoral liability. Read that again. The man is so radioactive that the administration that hired him is now running damage control on him. He went from “go wild on health” to “please stop talking” in under a year. That is a special kind of achievement.

Trump originally told Kennedy to “go wild on health.” That quote exists. It was said out loud, on the record, by the President of the United States about the person he appointed to oversee public health for three hundred and thirty million people. For people who live in bodies that require real medicine, real monitoring, and constant negotiation with uncertainty — people like me, who wake up some mornings genuinely unsure which part of their own nervous system is misbehaving today — there is nothing funny about that sentence. “Go wild” is not a public health strategy. It is an abdication dressed up as freedom, and somewhere between the measles cases and the canceled mental health grants, real people are paying for it.

But Kennedy is just the most recognizable face on a much larger problem, which I have come to think of as the Oprah doctor pipeline. For a long time, Oprah Winfrey was the most powerful talent-discovery machine in American media, and two of her most prominent exports — Dr. Phil McGraw and Dr. Mehmet Oz — have since followed nearly identical trajectories from daytime celebrity expert to full-throated MAGA adjacency. Oprah built them. MAGA finished them. The pipeline practically has its own org chart.

I always suspected Dr. Phil might be full of shit, but for years I did not have much of a critique beyond the obvious. He was a lousy television therapist with a catchphrase and a theme song. How much harm could he really do? Famous last words. Then the pandemic hit and I started seeing him on Fox News railing against school closures, and I remember thinking: is Dr. Phil a COVID epidemiologist now? Did I miss a press release? I mentioned it to my wife and she said maybe he is just thinking about the kids. And for a moment — a brief, charitable moment — I thought maybe she was right. Then I kept watching. By the time he finished his third false equivalency in eight minutes, I turned to her and said, I think Dr. Phil is going full MAGA. She said maybe he is just concerned. I said concerned people cite data. He is doing something else.

By the time the pandemic hit, I had finished my credit hours at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology and was deep into my dissertation, which had made me considerably more sensitive to sloppy arguments and rhetorical sleight of hand. What Dr. Phil was doing had a name. He would raise legitimate concerns — children need social interaction, kids in abusive homes may be trapped — and then use those real concerns as a bulldozer to flatten actual public health guidance. He would insist the whole time that he was not being political. That was the trick. He was using the language of psychology and common sense to perform neutrality while feeding audiences exactly the political worldview they already wanted. The neutrality was the performance. The politics were the product. And just like that, a man with a defunct Texas psychology license was out here shaping public health opinion for millions of people. Incredible.

Dr. Oz ran the same play with even less patience for subtlety. Like Phil, he came out of the Oprah machine and leveraged daytime television credibility into a brand that eventually outgrew its original premise. Unlike Phil, when Oz stepped into politics, he stopped pretending entirely. Here was a man best known as a television cardiologist and long-standing New Jersey resident deciding to run for Senate in Pennsylvania — Pennsylvania — on the strength of Trump’s endorsement and nothing else resembling a qualification. The man had lived in New Jersey for years but was suddenly a Pennsylvania guy because the Senate seat was available and nobody told him no. By then the slide made complete sense.

During the pandemic, he had already gone on Fox News and described reopening schools as an “appetizing opportunity” on the grounds that it would only result in two to three percent more people (children) dying — and then apologized and claimed he misspoke when the backlash arrived. That is not misspeaking. Misspeaking is calling someone by the wrong name. Publicly calculating an acceptable body count to score a political point is a choice. Once you make that choice on camera, there is not much road left except straight into MAGA. The credential had done its work.

Then there are the ideological intellectuals who run the same con from a more explicitly political perch — and who have somehow made it even more profitable. Ben Shapiro has a law degree from Harvard, which he uses primarily to talk very fast about things that are not legal arguments. Tucker Carlson attended one of the most expensive boarding schools in the country, spent some time at Trinity College, dropped out, and has somehow managed to turn that into a brand identity — as if leaving college makes you more authentically working class than the people who needed the degree to get a job. Both men have built entire media empires on the premise that institutions are corrupt, expertise is a scam, and the real wisdom lives in the gut instincts of people who have not been ruined by education. They market this premise exclusively to audiences who are unlikely to spend much time thinking about the fact that Shapiro went to Harvard and Carlson’s family has been rich for generations. The logical fallacy here has a name: special pleading. The rules apply to everyone except the person making them. Their credentials were fine. Yours are the problem. Enroll at your own risk.

And I want to be clear that this grift is not the exclusive property of the right, because I think people on the left need to sit with that honestly. Umar Johnson has a doctorate in psychology and has spent years telling Black Americans not to vote — not to engage with electoral politics at all — on the grounds that the system is irredeemably corrupt and participation legitimizes oppression. There are real critiques embedded in that argument, and I am not here to pretend otherwise. Structural racism is real. Voter suppression is real.

The Democratic Party’s relationship with Black voters has, at times, been so transactional it should come with a receipt. But Johnson takes those legitimate grievances and performs what logicians call the false dilemma — also known as the all-or-nothing fallacy: either the system is pure or it is not worth engaging, with nothing permitted to exist in between. There is no accounting for the documented evidence that Black communities fare measurably better on specific policy outcomes when specific coalitions hold power. The argument is not really about strategy. It is a performance of purity that requires no accountability, no coalition-building, and no hard compromises — just the dopamine hit of being the one who refused. The doctorate gets him in the room. Then the doctorate goes in the drawer.

That is the pattern underneath all of it. The credential gets you the audience. The audience gives you the platform. And then the platform is used to tell that same audience that credentials, institutions, expertise, and evidence are all part of the system that is keeping them down — unless, of course, we are talking about your specific credential, which is the one exception, obviously. The doctorate becomes a prop. The law degree becomes a branding element. The medical license becomes a permission slip to say things that would get a nobody laughed out of the room. It is a hell of a trick if you can pull it off. These people have been pulling it off for years.

Perhaps the most galling part — and for me this is genuinely personal — is that the pandemic revealed exactly how much damage this template could cause when it got access to real power. The rules were not fun. Nobody is arguing that lockdowns were a good time. They were isolating, economically brutal, and psychologically punishing for a lot of people. But instead of navigating a public health emergency with anything resembling seriousness, Trump downplayed the virus, promoted fraudulent treatments, contradicted his own scientists in real time, suggested people might want to look into injecting disinfectant, and helped seed the anti-vaccine sentiment the country is still dealing with years later. He then surrounded himself with credentialed charlatans who were either too credulous, too opportunistic, or too ideologically loyal to tell him he was wrong. RFK Jr. was not an outlier in that world. He was the logical conclusion of it.

For some people, all of this is political theater. It is content. It is something to dunk on between scrolling sessions. But for those of us who live in bodies that require constant monitoring, constant negotiation, and constant reliance on the kind of evidence-based medicine these grifters have spent years hollowing out — it is not theater. It is the morning when you cannot tell whether it is the MS or the surgery and you are lying there staring at the ceiling hoping the day gets easier, and the first thing you see when you pick up your phone is the man in charge of your country’s public health doing his best impression of a guy who has never read a peer-reviewed study in his life. The credential was always just the key. What they do with it once they are inside is the whole story. And right now, they are inside.